Wolff: How empty are television's suits?

Oct. 7, 2013
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Columnist Michael Wolff. / Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

There's a saying in the media business about how your assets go down in the elevator at night. Meaning that media isn't a business that relies on a fixed infrastructure, but is instead all about dynamic and creative people.

This view exists in spite of a substantial body of literature, many situation comedies and innumerable late-night talk show routines about the empty suits, venal as well as merely numbskulls, who actually populate so many of the offices in media land.

Accordingly, some recent personnel shifts at NBCUniversal have brought an onslaught of self-congratulatory memos from top management and slavish coverage in the press, while many sentient insiders are doubled over with laughter at the real story.

Patricia Sellers at Fortune - one of the media writers who television people can depend on to provide glowing accounts of their triumphs and genius - helped glob on the cream in her efforts to explain the departure of former NBCU wunderkind Lauren Zalaznick, "No. 48 on the 2012 Fortune Most Powerful Women list," as Sellers reminds.

In Sellers' view, the "colorful and quirky" Zalaznick, who oversaw Bravo, Oxygen and Telemundo, was an "anti-establishment exec," one with her own personal tag line: "Create, Innovate, Have Fun, Win." She wasn't really fired, Sellers tries to suggest. Rather, she really had been dying to escape the corporate world. In fact, she's been advising some start-ups, and, Seller says, don't be surprised if she ends up running one! (A good sign of being among the walking corporate dead is when you're described as advising start-ups.)

Zalaznick, so anti-establishment that she has spent the last dozen years as one of NBC's most zealous corporate climbers, provokes reliable hilarity at NBC for how perfectly she came to exemplify the full range of television network skill sets - managing up, hogging credit, grabbing power, terrifying staff and relentlessly managing her own press. (Helpfully, media writers are often trying to sell projects to the people they are writing about; Sellers, who did not respond to a request for comment, was herself pitching a reality show at Bravo while Zalaznick was in charge).

Obvious to all, Steve Burke, NBCU's CEO, effectively fired Zalaznick at the beginning of the year, taking away virtually all her responsibilities. But his version of firing her was to promote her into a new non-job job - a well-known network position. Zalaznick got a new title (executive vice president), amorphous responsibilities and an office near Burke's own. Accordingly, she began to take meetings about projects she couldn't authorize, interview people for jobs that would never exist and direct the members of her team to pretend that they, too, actually had real jobs.

Her official brief was to orchestrate collaborative efforts across the company "to focus on digital monetization and emerging technology." In other words, one of the most abrasive executives at the network was now a collaborator.

Might the problem be that Burke is the worst judge of character in a business of dubious characters? Or is it that, in the network world, everyone is given an almost infinite amount of rope to hang themselves?

Along with Zalaznick's departure last week, Burke also announced her replacement. Cesar Conde, who had been eased out of his job at Univision, the biggest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., would now take over many of Zalaznick's amorphous non-job responsibilities at NBCUniversal.

Conde, at 39, has a carefully curated Wikipedia entry, which includes estimable professional parents, Harvard, a stint as a White House fellow, a background in investment banking, membership on the Council of Foreign Relations and a long-time place on Fortune magazine's "40 under 40" list. It is very much the résumé of a corporate politician rather than a business operator.

At Univision, he was most noted as the protégé of then-CEO Joe Uva. Uva rose up the media ranks as a salesman, but on becoming CEO, refused to sell any more, and became most famous for constantly reminding people that now he was the CEO

Until he wasn't, replaced by Randy Falco, who was himself forced out of NBCU.

Then Steve Burke hired Uva. At first, Burke tried to get Uva to take a major companywide sales job, but Uva, having been a CEO, said it wouldn't do for him to go back to selling. Instead, Uva was made chairman of Telemundo, NBCU's Spanish-language network (official title: chairman, Hispanic Enterprises and Content). Except there was someone already running Telemundo, Emilio Romano, who finally left last week. (When Telemundo was overseen by Zalaznick, she spent much of her effort there taking Spanish classes).

Meanwhile, Uva, nobody's idea of the brightest bulb, became part of Steve Burke's brain trust (for awhile, Zalaznick told people she was Burke's brain trust). Now Cesar Conde follows Uva into the brain trust department, where he has been promoted from Uva's protégé to Steve Burke's protégé. Burke is said to be ecstatic at the sight of him.

Uva was given a job that someone else was doing. Conde got a job that was created for someone else who wasn't supposed to do anything. And Lauren Zalaznick is, you can be sure, planning her comeback.

Perhaps the most confounding aspect of this is how utterly ROFL transparent it all is. These are, clear to all, the emperor's empty suits, the assets who descend in the elevator each night from their phony-baloney jobs. That's network television! As it has always been, and as it remains, even with just about everyone saying how passionately they are focused on reinventing the business.

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